An appetite for books … Hannah Silva.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The stage is piled with copies of EJ James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. The woman sitting cross-legged on the floor is tearing out the pages, chewing them and spitting them out. As literary criticism goes, it’s biting stuff.

This one-woman performance by Hannah Silva puts James on a collision course with the author Kathy Acker, a literary pirate who took words, stories and identities from others, then cut them up and pasted them together in a stream of textual experiments. Silva does something similar here. She throws James’s words back at us in a breathy, incantatory style.

In his enforced contract with Ana in the novel, Christian Grey demands that she never snacks except on fruit. In Silva’s show, a pear becomes a breast; it is gobbled down, the juice running down her chin. Silva identifies every instance in which the word “pain” is mentioned in Fifty Shades, as Grey writes pain on Ana’s body.

Acker, who died from breast cancer in 1997, also wrote extensively about pleasure and pain and used to write on her own body.

Silva uses all of these juxtapositions to play with meaning, invoking Acker as an almost mythological figure, in this dense, complex, intelligent hour. It may not be for everyone, but the show celebrates the slipperiness of words, reinventing them so that none of them are safe.